


Joy Comes from Unexpected Places

by TheBookTheDragonSaved



Series: I will write this ship or I will die trying. [1]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Confusion, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Friendship, Idiots in Love, Love, Mantis is tougher than you think, One Shot, Surprises, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, We need more Loki and Mantis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:54:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23953387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBookTheDragonSaved/pseuds/TheBookTheDragonSaved
Summary: So, here's the funny thing about falling in love with an empath: They know it before you do.(Mantis and Loki totally confusing each other before a mission. And you know the sad thing? Loki is so emotionally confused that it kinda works...)FLUUFFF. SMILEY, GOOEY FLUUUUUUFFF (Also guys, I swear this pairing really works. Just think about it?)
Relationships: Loki & Mantis (Marvel), Loki/Mantis (Marvel)
Series: I will write this ship or I will die trying. [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1726816
Comments: 4
Kudos: 49





	Joy Comes from Unexpected Places

“So, in conclusion: orangutans good, llamas bad, and geese explosive. Got it? Cool; move out.” Stark waved his hand through the glowing display to shut it off and the Avengers shuffled steadily out of the room. It was a far larger group than it had been once, and Loki was right at the back, having been leaning unobtrusively (or as close as possible when one is a literal god among men) against a wall during the briefing. He had only recently returned to Earth after his stint with the Guardians, and preferred to keep out of the way.

Despite Stark’s casual tone, this was to be their most dangerous mission yet, to a planet near the heart of the Kree Empire where Captain Marvel was being held captive. Any enemy that could detain such a powerful being was one to be feared, and so, when Loki’s gaze caught on a dark head of hair, and two gently glowing fronds moving along with the throng, something made him call out to her.

“Mantis, may I speak with you for a moment?”

Her head turned at the sound of her name, along with several others who sent him curious glances, and she smiled sunnily when she caught sight of him. Gradually, she turned against the tide of bodies, making it back into the glass and steel room just as Barton and Romanov exited at the end of the line, the doors sliding sleekly shut behind them.

Now she and Loki were alone, and Mantis was waiting patiently to see what he had to say. Which would have been fine, if he’d known himself.

Truthfully, he wasn’t entirely sure why he’d called her back. He knew enough about societal patterns to realise that now was the time he would be expected to make some kind of statement, to solidify his connection with her, to wish her luck in case he never saw her again, and it was no doubt this natural impulse which had compelled him to call out to her. But he found that he did not have the words to tell her what she meant to him.

Not because it was too painful, (Loki hoped he would never be so overcome by foolish sentimentality that it would strip him of his reason) but because he did not know what she meant to him. This was more acceptable – a scholar could be forgiven for failing to speak on a topic if the reason was a lack of knowledge. Ignorance was, after all, far more easily corrected than emotion.

Well, his puzzlement should be easily enough fixed. Loki had always been a problem-solver (usually of problems he had created, but he conveniently ignored that part) and he saw no reason why his intelligence should not be able to solve his current predicament.

So, what _was_ Mantis to him? Not a casual acquaintance, certainly; he knew her far too well for that. If he had to guess, he’d say he had spent at least half his time with the Guardians in her company, more if he included time spent with the whole group, which he supposed he should, as he had often been situated either near or next to her. Furthermore, if one looked only at the last few weeks before the return to Earth, they had been together almost every waking minute, laughing and debating and learning in the nook she had shown him: close enough to the engines to feel their comforting hum, but far enough that they would not be disturbed by Rocket’s errant wanderings through the veins of the ship.

Of course, Loki understanding _her_ would not have made for much on its own. As an avid student of humanoid behaviour and a manipulator of many years’ experience, he understood most people better than they understood themselves. No, what made Mantis different is that she understood _him_ , too. Through their conversations, which seemed to ebb and flow so easily, coupled with her inherent abilities, it was likely that she understood him as well as his mother had.

Better even – for unlike his mother, Mantis’s abilities and her use of language as a secondary form of communication, rather than a primary one, seemed to give her the edge she needed to avoid being thrown off by his various lies.

Such a close bond could surely have only one conclusion – and what a brilliant thing it was. He double-checked his reasoning, going over his memories and checking each one with a scholar’s eye. Yes; all the threads pointed to the same thing, and it shone like light on an underground river, unlooked for and illuminating.

_He had a friend._

Not an ally, made and maintained through careful discussions in Asgard’s great halls; nor an admirer such as those that had clustered around his older brother. A true friend of his own who he could (oh impossible joy!) trust implicitly, safe in the knowledge that this brilliant, shining creature didn’t have a cruel bone in her body.

He opened his mouth to speak – to share with her this wondrous conclusion – but Mantis had apparently waited long enough, and she cut in first.

“I love you too,” she declared.

Loki almost choked on his tongue.

When his overloaded brain had cooled slightly, he just barely managed to cough up a rasping:

_“What?”_

A look of confusion flitted across Mantis’s face. “Is that not what you were going to say?” she asked worriedly. “I assumed since we are currently saying goodbye before a dangerous mission- That is; this is usually the time for such confessions.”

“No.” Loki shook his head and stammered. “Well, yes, I was going to- but- I wasn’t; I mean – I’m not in love with you,” he finished, not too harshly.

This only made Mantis’s eyebrows draw down further. “Yes, you are,” she told him, with the air of someone worried he might have hit himself on the head a little too hard.

“No,” Loki insisted. “I am not.”

“Yes, you are,” she repeated.

“I am not.”

“Are!”

“Am not!”

“Are too!”

“Not!”

“You are!” she cried.

This could well have gone on all day.

It didn’t, of course – but it did go on for several more minutes, and so for the sake of you, the reader, we will skip to the end:

“Yes.” Mantis said deliberately. “You. Are.”

Loki let out a frustrated huff, and spun around to face the window. “How dare you!” he exclaimed heatedly. “Of all the overbearing, inelegant social disasters you could possibly involve yourself in, how dare you assert to-”

“Know what you are feeling?” Mantis interrupted pointedly.

He stalled. True, he’d yet to see Mantis make a mistake in her readings, and she’d had plenty of opportunities to check in the closed space of the Benatar, but surely…

He turned back around to look at her beseechingly, searching for any sign of a trick in those dark eyes. There was none. “Really?” he asked.

“Really,” Mantis confirmed with a solemn nod.

Loki winced. “For ah, for how long?”

Mantis smiled, considerably calmer now that he had accepted the inevitable. “Not so long,” she said reassuringly. “Perhaps three months?”

“Three months?” Loki echoed, aghast. He suddenly felt he needed to sit down, and summoned a  
chair from the table, falling into it heavily.

Mantis nodded happily again. “Three months of being _fully_ in love,” she clarified. “Although your feelings had been growing for the better part of a year before that.”

“And by ‘fully’, you mean…?”

“Head over heels,” she said cheerfully. “Hooked, spellbound, gone under. Enraptured,” she continued. “Held captive, enamoured, mad about – Terrans really do have an abundance of terms for it-” She looked ready to go further, but finally noticing that Loki was looking slightly crestfallen, she cut her torrent of words short. “Loki?” she asked, obviously realising that she might have misjudged the situation.

Loki gave no answer, sitting stock still with an oddly blank look on his face.

“Loki?” she repeated nervously.

“Mmm?”

“Did… did you not know?”

He looked up at her dazedly. “Well… Not in so many words.”

Mantis stopped short, staring at him in stunned silence, and they did not move for a full three minutes.

Eventually, she stirred before he did, staring briefly out the window as she ordered her reeling thoughts, before turning back to look at the room’s other inhabitant in indignant disbelief.

“How!?” she exclaimed.

Loki groaned and buried his head in his hands. “I don’t know; I thought we were friends!”

Mantis’s mouth gaped open. “You have been in love with me for _three months!_ ” she cried in despair. “We spent every waking moment of the last week together – even Rocket noticed, and he only realised that Peter and Gamora were involved after half a year of them dancing in the cockpit every other week!”

That hit a nerve. Loki, Prince of Asgard and Lord of Lies, did not like feeling slower on the uptake  
than a _raccoon_.

“I only spent the last week on that blasted ship with you,” he snarled, “because I had finally decided alliances with those _buffoons_ you choose to call friends were not beneficial enough to make me spend another minute in their company. You were the lesser of two evils, merely because you are the only one on that ship with enough mental fortitude to stay quiet for more than three seconds at a time.”

Mantis sighed in frustration, and somehow looked even more exhausted. “How can anyone be this emotionally confused?” she asked exasperatedly, then continued to speak in a slow and deliberate tone, as if explaining something to a child, rather than a man several hundred years her senior. “You spent the last week of your time on our ship with me, because you knew we were going to Earth, and you didn’t want to leave me. Because you _love_ me,” she added, just to hammer it in.

Loki gritted his teeth and thought about that. He supposed he had noticed a few awkward pangs in his chest over the last few days of their travels, but being around Mantis had done strange things to him for months now, so- oh. Ohh. Ohhhh.

Hel.

How had he not noticed? Anytime they had stopped to watch a star go supernova in a flower-like burst, or the collision of a comet with a red giant, pastel shades of rippling blue blooming from the impact point, he hadn’t been watching the stars; he’d been watching their reflection in her eyes.

He closed his own eyes briefly, and realised that it didn’t matter; that he could still see her with perfect clarity, every contour of her silken skin; the sleek, dark length of her gleaming hair, hovering just at her shoulders; the gentle sloping of her nose and lips; and that soft, constant shine in her eyes, waiting for the next thing to bring her wonder.

Every expression he had ever seen on her began to flick quickly through his mind, each in perfect clarity, and he found that his own shifted swiftly to match. Joy at her joy; grief at her grief; sorrow and worry at her listlessness; and awe at her bright, blinding curiosity which switched targets so fast that for the first time in his life, he could barely keep up.

With a slow, glowing warmth, he came back to himself, like a dreamer waking from a long sleep, and his surroundings came into cold focus once more. He blinked.

Mantis had seemingly given up waiting for him to reply and was now hyperventilating as she paced the room, flitting over the muted orange carpet and muttering to herself in panicked, tumbling sentences. Loki was still slightly shell-shocked, but he caught something about ‘Peter told me’, and ‘too early’, and ‘scare him off’.

He licked his lips nervously and drew breath to speak, but then something else caught in his mind.  
“You love me too?” he asked confusedly.

Mantis stopped in her tracks; eyes still frantically wide. “What?”

“That’s what you said,” Loki clarified, rising unsteadily to his feet. “Earlier. You said you loved me too.”

Apparently unsure of herself, Mantis swayed slightly where she stood. “I thought you were going to-” She cut herself off and took ragged breath, then looked him in the face and suddenly the depth of her gaze reminded him slightly of his mother; that feeling that she could see more of him than he could of himself. Then her bearing softened, and she once again seemed to glow with that kind of strength that was hers and hers alone. “Of course, I do,” she said calmly. “You are clever, and observant, and determined. And also, very pretty.” She blushed slightly after the last comment, but it barely showed on her pale skin.

“I’m also an egomaniacal murderer,” Loki pointed out numbly, unconsciously falling back into the same argument they’d had almost every week on the ship.

And, as with every other time, Mantis just shrugged slightly. “I have seen worse,” she said, without the slightest hint of irony. And she had; he knew that. “Besides,” she said airily, inching closer and offering him a playful smile. “You give me books.”

Loki chuckled slightly at that, because that was it really, wasn’t it? As strange as it might seem, they had formed a kind of symbiotic relationship on the ship, both observant enough to recognise in each other the things that other people couldn’t. That kind of mutual understanding and respect was something he had never had with anyone else, not even his brother, so for once in his life, couldn’t he just accept what was being offered?

And yet, though it should be a simple thing, to accept the affection so freely given, Loki was a master of overthinking, and he could already feel his mind beginning to spiral, bringing up old fears and hatreds to drive a hole through what could be the first truly _good_ thing he'd had in a very long time. But then a warm hand slipped into his, and he was pulled out of his thoughts to find Mantis looking calmly up at him, wide eyes barely ten inches from his face. He could trust her. Of course, he could. Because she was kind, and calm, and brim-full of compassion; all the things he was not.

So, he reached the hand not holding hers up to hold the back of her neck, and bent down slowly to kiss her.

The moment their lips touched, he felt a flood of foreign emotions, like a whirlwind. This must be what she felt, all the time. He could feel her nervousness, her uncertainty and clawing self-doubt. Her excitement, her relief and joy. But sweeping over all of these things like a wave, smoothing them over and covering them like glass, was an unstoppable torrent of what could only be called _love_.

It was wonderful.

**Author's Note:**

> Awwww... Hope it made you smile :) I had this idea a while back, and I love it; it's just such an absurd situation. I know it might feel a little out of character without any previous relationship building, but I wanted to write fluuuuuuffff, so... 
> 
> There _are_ other ways of interpreting a relationship between these two which fit better with the MCU, but this was fun and has a kind of neatness to it. Both underestimated, and 'so perceptive, about everyone but [them]selves'. Mantis in failing to recognise her own strength, and Loki in refusing to acknowledge his capacity for good. Together it works, no?
> 
> My diabolical plan for more Loki + Mantis fics: If you liked this, be inspired. There are so few fics of these two on the internet that I can currently _promise_ to read and kudos literally anything anyone writes. And if you dislike this, write it better than me, just to prove how rubbish I am.
> 
> \- You see how I win either way? Hehehe. I am truly a mastermind. (Except not. Very, very not.)


End file.
